PolicyLab

Tristan Maesaka (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow at PolicyLab and the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Maesaka works with Dr. Jami Young and other PolicyLab investigators in the Adolescent Depression Prevention and Treatment (ADePT) Lab. She is involved in several studies focused on enhancing and disseminating interventions for adolescent depression and suicidality in primary care, as well as a project aimed to strengthen capacity for implementing, evaluating, and sustaining evidence-based school mental health promotion programs.

Prior to fellowship, Dr. Maesaka’s research broadly focused on improving the effectiveness and implementation of scalable, evidence-based programs in community and school mental health systems, particularly in underserved communities. She worked closely with community partners in these settings, co-leading initiatives to evaluate the statewide implementation of a modular therapy program and investigating multi-level factors influencing training outcomes.

Dr. Maesaka received her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She completed her predoctoral clinical internship at CHOP on the integrated behavioral health track.